1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to systems for automatically harvesting, cooping and transporting chickens.
2. Brief Description of the Prior Art
In the poultry industry, it is necessary to gather or harvest chickens from very large poultry houses in which the chickens are raised, for the purpose of cooping them and shipping them to a processing plant where the chickens are decapitated, plucked and prepared for the consumer market. An important concern in this harvesting and transporting operation is the speed and cost of gathering together the chickens and placing them in trucks. Previously, this has been accomplished primarily by manual means with unskilled labor and preferably, in most instances, working at night when the chickens are more easily harvested than in the day. The increasing cost and difficulty of obtaining reliable, productive labor for this task has, in part, led to the development of an automatic chicken harvesting apparatus which I have depicted and described in my copending application Ser. No. 492,348 filed July 26, 1974 and entitled "Method and Apparatus for Harvesting Domestic Fowl".
As was pointed out in my copending patent application, another important consideration in the harvesting and transporting of chickens is the desideratum of handling the chickens in a manner which will avoid bruising the chickens in any way, since bruising of the fowl results in a curtailment of the price which the producer can expect to obtain after the chickens arrive at the processing plant and are inspected. Accordingly, it is continuing quest of the poultry industry to devise improved methods for both harvesting and transporting chickens so as to handle the fowl in a manner which does not cause them to flutter violently about against various rigid confining structures, or to be treated roughly in the cooping process, with the result that the flesh is bruised or the chicken injured. It is also, of course, desirable to accomplish as much as possible of the harvesting, cooping and transporting operation, from the point of harvesting to the point of processing in the processing plant, by completely automatic means, and without the requirement for manual labor for loading and unloading the chickens.